HP CEO: Dwindling Tech Talent Could Hurt the U.S.

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HP CEO: Dwindling Tech Talent Could Hurt the U.S.

Americans are getting dumb, and it's difficult to attract top tech talent to the U.S. now. Or so says Mark Hurd, CEO of Hewlett-Packard.

Speaking at an event at Castilleja, a private girls school in Palo Alto, where his daughter attends, Hurd lamented the sorry state of technical research in the U.S.

"In this country, we have a problem," Hurd says. "The source of this country's greatness has been its technical talent . . . But you have to go where the tech talent is, and right now the tech talent is in Asia."

Hurd says that only 40 percent of HPs 40,000 engineers are now based in the U.S., where it had previously employed about two-thirds of its engineering force domestically.

"We often can't keep [engineers] in the country even after they've graduated from U.S. universities like Stanford," Hurd said.

If it sounds like a politically conservative, alarmist statement, it's worth noting that Hurd sits on the board of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. (a notoriously conservative organization). He also says he gets all his news from Fox News. (We think he was joking . . . Sort of.)